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Meet a zulily developer: Beryl

I am Beryl, a Software Engineer on the EMS (Event Management Systems) Team. I work on the internal tools that help other zulily teams set up and manage sales.

When did you join zulily?

I started at the end of July, 2013 — almost a year and a half ago.

What’s a typical day like for you?

Every day I am usually spending some time working on my assigned projects, reviewing designs or code from other members of my team and supporting users. The work I do on projects depends on the project I am working on as well as at what stage that project is at. Various things I might do for project work include drawing up user interface designs, attending meetings with our users, coding and testing.

What is one of your favorite projects you finished and launched to production?

My favorite would have to be a rewrite of a page that provided an audit for what we sell. The page had become extremely slow, the data source had been deprecated and was often inaccurate and it was not tailored to what our internal users needed to do. When we realized this was taking up a huge amount of time for our users, I was able to talk to them to figure out their intended workflow and propose a new design. Within a fairly short period of time we had a new page up and running that everyone was happier with and that provided accurate data.

What was it like in the early days? Tell us a crazy story.

When I first joined, I spent some time looking around the application I work on. It was very surprising when I came across a couple of error/info messages that included pictures of my coworkers for humorous effect. Some still exist, but I think they’re slowly starting to disappear…

What gets you excited about working for zulily?

The sense of community I get from other employees. As a developer on internal tools, I get a lot of opportunity to meet with employees from a bunch of different parts of the company. Additionally, I am enjoying getting to know engineers across all tech teams through our small, but growing, women-in-tech community. Even though the company has grown so much since I first started, it still manages to feel just as small!